The Holy Trinity of Austrian Taboos: Nuclear, NATO, Neutrality

Contribution to the Pragmaticus "Restart Austria" series

The Republic’s dire state cannot be remedied with cosmetic repairs, and Pragmaticus is right to demand that the fresh start begin with sacred cows. Federalism, healthcare, subsidies and pensions all deserve the knife. But there is a deeper layer of taboo beneath the fiscal ones, and as a geopolitical strategist I would argue that in today’s transformational phase of international relations, everything begins with geopolitics. Every country has its unspeakable words. Austria has three, and all of them start with N: Nuclear, NATO and Neutrality. Together they form a holy trinity of taboos that blocks honest debate, strategic adaptation and policy progress, leaving Austria retrograde at the very moment its European peers are adapting fastest. Desperate times necessitate desperate decisions. So let us break all three at once.

The first N-word: nuclear

Austria is a genuine front runner in electrification based on renewables. Renewable energy accounted for 87.5 per cent of total electricity generation in 2024, approximately 71.3 TWh and one of the highest shares in Europe. Yet transmission infrastructure has not expanded quickly enough to accommodate the growing volume and geographical concentration of renewable power. Austrian Power Grid had to intervene in power-plant schedules on 203 days in 2024 to prevent network overloads, curtailing around 57.4 GWh of renewable electricity. The latest complete annual data show no improvement: redispatch interventions were required on 215 days in 2025, while the associated costs rose from roughly €84 million to €87.2 million. Austria has accelerated investment in grid infrastructure, but the physical bottlenecks preventing renewable electricity from reaching demand centres remain unresolved. A country that bets this heavily on volatile renewables needs stable, dispatchable, low-carbon baseload, especially while riding the wave of the fourth industrial revolution, in which digitalisation, data centres, artificial intelligence and the electrification of industry will drive electricity demand relentlessly upward.

The honest answer is nuclear. And here Austria’s position has curdled from principle into hypocrisy: the country maintains a moral-ideological anti-nuclear consensus dating back to the Zwentendorf referendum of 1978, while importing electricity from neighbours whose grids run substantially on nuclear power. We do not reject nuclear electrons; we merely refuse to produce them.

Meanwhile, the rest of Europe is moving decisively in the other direction. Denmark, for four decades the very symbol of anti-nuclear sentiment, launched a formal review of its 1985 ban in 2025 and passed legislation authorising exploratory studies into next-generation reactors, with its prime minister declaring it better to have nuclear power in Europe than to rely on Russian gas. Belgium’s parliament scrapped its phase-out by an overwhelming majority. Italy has begun the legislative process of overturning its ban. Sweden and Finland are expanding, Japan is restarting, and more than twenty countries pledged at COP28 to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050. Austria and Germany stand as the last outliers, on the wrong side of both energy security and industrial competitiveness. Opening the nuclear debate is not a betrayal of the renewable success story. It is its logical completion.

The second N-word: NATO

The second taboo concerns rearmament. And it is rearmament, not armament, because what is at stake is the filling of defence gaps left by decades of underinvestment. Austrian defence spending had risen to a mere 1.0 per cent of GDP by 2024. The government’s commitment to reach two per cent by 2032 sounds ambitious by Austrian standards, but it is too little, arriving too late. NATO members have meanwhile agreed on five per cent by 2035: three and a half per cent for hard defence and one and a half per cent for critical and physical infrastructure. Austria, surrounded by NATO states on every side except Switzerland, plans to spend less than half of that, and solely on defence, with no comparable commitment to infrastructure at all.

This is where the economic argument bites, and where the Pragmaticus question of Austria’s restart becomes concrete. It is Austrian industry and Austrian companies that would directly benefit from filling the gaps in critical and physical infrastructure: digital networks, energy infrastructure such as LNG connections and pipelines, and the highways and rail corridors linking Austria northward and eastward to the new centre of gravity of European security. NATO is consolidating its eastern flank and will massively expand physical, military and dual-use infrastructure along the arc running from Finland and Sweden in the north, through the Baltic states, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary, down to Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Türkiye. Along this arc, a new iron curtain is being drawn between Russia and European NATO. It is the natural habitat for Austrian economic and industrial expansion.

And here lies an uncomfortable geographic truth: Austria is losing its traditional central position. The country is no longer at the crossroads between East and West but increasingly on the periphery of a security and defence order shifting eastward. The infrastructure investment, the defence-industrial cooperation and the political attention are all flowing to the eastern flank. A security-policy gap is opening in the heart of Europe, and Austria lies precisely within it. There is a ready-made vehicle to close it: the Three Seas Initiative on Connectivity (physica, digital, raw materials, supply chase, security and defence), of which Austria is a member together with another 12 EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe, with the United States and the European Union as strategic partners and Ukraine invited to participate. Add the coming enlargement, meaning the integration of Ukraine and Moldova into the common market on top of the Western Balkans, and the strategic stakes for Austrian trade and investment become enormous. A country that refuses even to open the NATO debate shuts its own companies out of these conversations and these investments.

The third N-word: neutrality

Austrian neutrality was defined in 1955, within a twentieth-century security environment characterised by clear military front lines. Today’s environment is one of comprehensive hybrid warfare: information operations, cyberattacks, energy blackmail, weaponised migration, nuclear coercion and geoeconomic influence have long been integral parts of modern conflict. Against none of these does neutrality offer any protection whatsoever. A cyberattack does not check constitutional status before crossing the border.

Worse, the “neutral island of the blessed” mindset creates dangerous illusions and textbook free-rider behaviour. The numbers are damning: ninety per cent of Austrians believe EU member states should come to Austria’s military aid if it is attacked, while only thirteen per cent believe Austria should do the same for others. Three-quarters of Austrians admit the country cannot defend itself against armed attack, yet three-quarters also insist neutrality must be preserved. Austria is caught in a Schrödinger’s cat paradox: simultaneously close to NATO and yet neutral, but in reality neither, and this ambiguity is itself becoming the country’s greatest security risk. Moscow, for its part, has long treated Austrian neutrality instrumentally, holding up the 1955 model as a template for a “subjugated” Ukraine, while Austria’s own credibility is undermined by its economic entanglements, from years of extreme dependence on Russian gas to spy networks on the ground to the continued Russian exposure of its flagship bank.

The comparative lesson is stark. Finland and Sweden abandoned decades of non-alignment and joined NATO within two years of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Denmark abolished its EU defence opt-out by referendum and re-entered the European security and defence field. Even Switzerland is debating closer cooperation with NATO. Austria, by contrast, remains stuck in 1995, the year it joined the EU and last seriously examined its status.

None of this requires abandoning neutrality tomorrow. Legally, neutrality says only two things: no foreign bases on Austrian soil and no membership in a military alliance. It could be abandoned by a two-thirds majority in parliament without any mandatory popular vote, although politically a change of this magnitude would almost certainly face overwhelming pressure for a referendum. And even then, removing the constitutional prohibition would only open the door: NATO accession itself would require a separate accession process thereafter. The legal path exists; what is missing is the political one. Austria’s political forces currently give the impression of fearing their own electorate and its old sentiments, rather than having the courage, the skin in the game, to show leadership and articulate a vision of what actually matters for the country’s new start.

But even short of any constitutional change, neutrality must be reconceptualised as an instrument of active sovereignty rather than an excuse for passivity. That means massive investment in resilience, cyber defence, critical infrastructure and airspace surveillance, investments that, undertaken alone, will cost significantly more than a NATO contribution ever would. It means full-blooded participation in PESCO, the European Defence Fund and the Sky Shield initiative, and an end to reflexive caveats on EU mutual assistance. Greater integration into European defence structures is not a contradiction of neutrality; it is a necessary adaptation to geopolitical reality. What it requires is the one thing Austrian politics has refused to supply: an honest debate, led rather than suppressed.

The proposal: a restart built on four Rs

My suggestion for the Austrian restart is the radical launch of a national debate on the holy trinity of the three N-words: Nuclear, NATO and Neutrality as a geopolitical and geoeconomic package. This would confront Austrian society with the severity of the current moment, a make-it-or-break-it juncture for the entire Austrian economic and industrial model, arriving amid a systemic conflict of a new Cold War between America and the DragonBear, the China-Russia axis of strategic coordination across all systemically relevant domains. That model needs to be recentred around four Rs: reindustrialisation, reinnovation, rearmament and re-energising. Together they amount to a fourfold renewal of the country: industrial, innovative, military and energy. The last of these includes domestic gas production and nuclear power, built on top of the renewable backbone Austria has already created. A country that puts the emphasis on renewables for its electricity must now find the will to comprehensively renew itself in geopolitical terms. Neutrality must not be understood as an end in itself, but as part of an active sovereignty policy in a Europe that is reorganising itself. Opening these three debates costs nothing. Refusing to open them is the one luxury Austria can no longer afford in a vastly changing old continent.